Forty Rooms (33 page)

Why did you do it to me? Mrs. Caldwell demanded, not bothering with small talk; for there was no time for that. Is it because your father drank, your mother slapped you, your childhood was a low-ceilinged, dismal trap? Did you think the poverty of your life gave you the right to steal from me, as you have done for years—for I see everything now, all those books of yours with their ballet dancers and precious heirlooms and cuckoo clocks, even the names, even the faces, you used my friends, you used my family, you used me, turned me into a cipher on a page, on a screen—why, why? Was it not enough for you to have taken the boy I liked all those years ago, must you now try to take my past
as well? Olga sounded apologetic but firm, sure of herself. She talked about art, no, Art—Mrs. Caldwell could hear the solemn rise in her tone each time she said it—and the illusory nature of memory, and the purgative power of the autobiographical impulse, and the greater artistic truths revealed sometimes by borrowing, sometimes by distorting, what might be called reality; not to mention the fact that whatever she might have borrowed from Mrs. Caldwell was now immortalized, an indelible footprint in the sands of time—

But already, tiring of the imaginary conversation, she released her immaterial hold on the nonexistent receiver, and briefly opened her eyes—and the darkness of the room crowded her still, and the dizzying pain was still there; so, closing her eyes, she thought, fighting through the chaos of her mind: But this does not matter, this isn’t important, I shouldn’t waste another moment thinking about it, for no one can take my past away from me, it’s mine alone, and it’s here, it has always been here, and if I float away from this pain that has narrowed and sharpened until it has become the piercing needle on whose tip the universe is spinning so quickly—if I walk away into this glowing mist, into this welcoming warmth, I will once again feel the trickle of lukewarm water down my back, and hear my grandmother’s voice, and smell the sweet tang of the soap, and see the tree, the great ancient tree at the heart of the world, and sense the boundless promise of the future unfolding before me, and no one, no one, will ever take that away from me . . .

Overwhelmed by confusion, I stare at Mrs. Caldwell slumped over in her chair. I do not quite know how I got to my feet, nor do
I remember turning on the lights, yet I see things so surely, down to the smallest of details—the beige carpet stained by countless soda spills, the tassels on the velvet curtains tied into messy knots by the busy hands of restless children, the strands of Mrs. Caldwell’s hair plastered over her moist forehead. Everything is bright and clear and precise and, at the same time, slightly off, as though every object has moved an inch to the side and now shimmers with a doubled contour—the way things appear sometimes when your eyes are brimming over with tears, in the second before you blink them away.

For a moment my world totters on the brink of falling over, as vast, invisible things strain to burst into light. Then the moment moves on. I am overtaken by a marvelous sense of an unexpected, unhoped-for liberation. I am free, I am somehow—finally!—free of this woman who is not me, who has never been me—free of the complacent, materialistic, dim oppression of her timid spirit. Light-headed with the immensity, with the joy, of this new freedom, I look again at Mrs. Caldwell. She continues to sit slumped over in her chair, her face covered by the fallen hair. She is, I imagine, still fuming over the irrelevant movie, insisting that her past is hers alone, planning perhaps to set her husband’s lawyer on her treacherous friend . . . I am wondering if I should speak to her, when I am seized with a sharp, almost animal panic at the thought of lingering another instant in her oddly immobile, heavy-limbed presence.

Jerking my eyes away from the woman, I pass out of the room.

I feel another, lighter prick of panic when I realize that I cannot recall having parted the pompous curtains as I stepped over the
threshold, but I dispel my fear quickly: I am, it is true, a little hazy about what has happened—about what is happening—to me, yet I am certain there will be plenty of time to sort it out later. For now, it is enough to know I am free. I am ready to go and live fully at last. I have so many plans, I think in a fever of joyous agitation. I will leave this house, I will travel, I will cross unfamiliar roads and turn blind corners without trepidation, I will look up old friends and talk to strangers, I will capture every moment of joy, every crumb of discovery, as I write all the poetry I have ever meant to write.

I do not remember the last time I felt so alive.

40. Entrance Hall

Departures

And so I have made up my mind to leave. I told Paul I intended to go to Russia for a while, spend a few months in the countryside reliving my childhood, and he did not raise a single objection; in fact, he appeared distraught about something and did not seem to hear me at all. His indifference saddened me a little, but I reminded myself of the journey ahead and felt restored to happiness. I will not go to Russia just yet; I will save it for last. For now, I will follow religious processions through the ancient streets of Spanish towns, I will sit on mud floors in African huts listening to the midnight roar of lions, I will taste unknown fruits in the floating markets of Asia. I will walk through the mountains, the valleys, the forests of the world, all-seeing and all-hearing, greedy for every tiny morsel of life. Perhaps I will come back, perhaps not.

I have already decided what to bring with me on my travels. I
will take almost nothing—just a thick sweater, a pair of sturdy walking shoes, my passport with its pages virginally clear of stamps, a handful of pens, a notebook, my dog-eared volume of Annensky, and Celia’s lopsided blue bunny. I have not actually packed—in truth, things have developed a somewhat disconcerting tendency to pass through my fingers, but I choose not to dwell on such matters; I cannot leave just yet, in any case. Three and a half decades of maternal habits cannot be discarded so easily, and there are still a few loose ends to tie up before I can go: the birth of my second grandchild in February, followed by Eugene’s homecoming over Easter, followed by another reunion in July—

In between family visits, I wander the house. As often as not, I end up in the entrance hall, and there I sit, going over the packing list in my mind, dreaming of escaping soon, so soon, almost any day now. The entrance hall is a grand space inscribed into the stately arc of the marble staircase, crowded with stuffy, lion-pawed chairs and consoles. One’s entrance hall—my decorator told me once, a third of a century ago now—should serve as a perfect introduction to the house that follows; to the world of people forever kept on its doorstep, peering wistfully over the homeowner’s shoulder (a delivery man, a gardener, a Jehovah’s Witness, God visiting incognito), it should offer a tantalizing hint of the wonders that await the lucky few allowed within. When we first saw the house, I remember the awed sense I had upon entering—that of an immense place, full of possibilities, unfolding inward, like that magic house from a childhood fairy tale that was bigger on the inside than on the outside.

Now I know it to be the other way around. On the inside, the
house is much, much smaller than its sprawling, many-columned façade would lead one to believe.

As I sit in the entrance hall, revising my list (I will not, after all, need that sweater), I stare at the enormous double doors of brilliantly polished oak reflected in the expanse of the brilliantly polished marble floors. I never throw the doors open, for fear that temptation will move me to make a dash for it before I have quite disposed of the last of my matriarchal obligations. Sometimes I do feel a surge of frustration, as though I am a clockwork toy that has been wound up and cannot act of its own accord until it completes the predetermined range of its mechanical motions. In other, darker moments, my throat tightens with panic—what if it is simply too late, what if over the years I have sprouted such thick roots that I will be unable to walk away? But such thoughts are only signs of weakness, so I force myself to breathe, and busy my mind with shaving more unnecessary items off the list (I decide I do not want the walking shoes either), and muse on my past, on the decisions I have made in my life, on the roads I have followed and not followed. I imagine having had five children, or two, or none; I imagine having left Paul or never having married him; I imagine having gone to Paris with Adam; I imagine not having stayed in America, or not having left Russia; I imagine having crossed that dirt road and kissed that boy; I imagine having never given up my poetry. I remember a little girl who lived in a faraway country with long, cold winters and bright summer stars—a girl who had a mermaid for a mother, a sage for a father, a god for a guide—a girl who loved life and played with words and looked out of the small window of her small room to behold
the whole world. And when my memories start crowding my chest with something much like sobs, I distract my attention with the comings and goings of people around me.

For the house, even as it lies fallow during Paul’s business trips, between my children’s and grandchildren’s visits, is never entirely empty. If I sit still enough, letting my mind drift free until it bursts the imprisonment of matter, I begin to see the riches of things that skip, slide, and dance beneath the surface of the world—and I can then sense ghostly women moving through the house. All with their own versions of my elderly face, they walk through the rooms on their different errands, possessed of varied degrees of presence and persistence—some mere echoes, glimpses, faint wisps of holographic lives, others coming through so clearly, so tangibly, it seems as if I could reach out and truly touch them. I understand that they are not really here, of course, for they are only a vast, cosmic branching of endless possibilities, of numberless outcomes—all of them variations on my own fate, passing through mirror dimensions, brushing by me, fading in and out of sight—an endless theater of myself, parading before me as I sit in the entrance hall, ruminating on the packing list (I can do without the passport, I think), dreaming of all the poetry I will compose once I am away.

The woman I see most often is an absolute bore, an expensively dressed phantom of a person with not an original thought in her exquisitely coiffed head. She spends her days straightening the rooms and leafing through magazines; her visitors are of the most prosaic sort, electricians and rug cleaners and dog walkers; in the evenings, when her husband’s car pulls into the driveway, she
dabs a touch of lipstick on her faded mouth before the entrance hall mirror, and waits, smiling meekly, tilting her head at the sound of his key in the lock. Paul is kind to her, if ever so slightly dismissive.

A more disturbing presence is a Mrs. Caldwell who has only five children and whose husband abandoned her for his secretary two decades before, though leaving her in full possession of the house. She dyes her indecently long hair blond and has dabbled in plastic procedures. Every time the doorbell rings on a Friday night, she clatters across the marble floor in her stilettos, and I catch a terrible glimpse of my features drawn on a sixty-five-year-old flesh-colored balloon, stretched and bloated. I hurry to avert my eyes, just as she is letting in her much younger boyfriend, to whom she then glues herself in a long, slurping kiss. I believe the man is no good; he is after her money. She has started to write love poetry, too. I find her frankly embarrassing.

There are a few others here as well—a thin-lipped, dieting, strident Mrs. Caldwell who has gone to work at some downtown office doing who knows what, as well as a flighty Mrs. Caldwell who occupies herself with trying to translate her mother’s poetry and is prone to bursting into tears whenever any of her children visit. My favorite Mrs. Caldwell is plump and energetic, young at sixty-seven, with a bristle of unkempt hair and a marvelous touch with her grandchildren; her house is always overrun with them (Emma is divorced now and living here with her two daughters while she studies for her architect’s exam, and Eugene and Adriana often visit with their baby). She appears genuinely happy, and seems to love everyone, just as everyone loves her, and her
entrance hall is always traipsed over with muddy footprints and wet leaves, chaotic with toddler shoes and lunch boxes and mismatched mittens and shed petals of flowers and the bustle of dogs. I think of her belly laugh, her jolly face, to ward off despair whenever I see that other woman, that obese, slovenly, gray-haired and gray-faced woman who lives all alone and drags herself through the house, dressed in a dirty pink robe and dirty pink slippers, sighing wetly, mumbling poems under her breath, never failing to twist my heart with pity. I do not know her story, but I can see death in her stark, empty eyes—a child’s death—and I turn away every time, horrified and ashamed for some reason.

There may also be a Mrs. Caldwell who is moving away—though, strangely enough, neither she nor Paul is organizing the move; it is only the children, much older now, who come to the house, arriving in somber groups of two and three. Maggie and Celia, I notice, have been crying, Emma is white-lipped as she speaks to Eugene on the phone, giving him details of some funeral arrangements, asking when his flight from Bucharest is due to land, and I overhear Rich consoling George as they stand in the doorway surveying the boxes. For the entrance hall has been filling up with boxes upon boxes in the past few weeks—boxes of porcelain, boxes of silver, paintings wrapped in cocoons of padded paper, precious plates buried in crates of packing peanuts, contractors and realtors coming and going, two electricians carrying the dining room chandelier trussed up like a slaughtered boar on a pole between them. As the movers shuttle in and out on moving day, the double doors stand open for hours at a time, and hour after hour I sit in the hall, revising the packing list in my head (I
have resolved to leave the notebook and the pens behind) and staring outside, at the rectangle of the gray November sky above the movers’ heads, at the waving of the oak tree’s naked branches. When the final boxes depart, I feel relieved to be rid of all that useless stuff at last, but a bit depressed too. I catch a glimpse of a “For Sale” sign stuck in the lawn outside, and then the doors close, and the house stands empty and dark, a winter draft from below the doors blowing a dead oak leaf across the filthy floor. To the left, then to the right, then to the left again, flutters the leaf. I wonder if it has my name written on it, and attempt to smile at the thought; but I do not get up to look. The lights of the grand chandelier above me no longer come on, for the electricity has been turned off; I can sense the long winter night moving in.